The Use of Reason is a blog that takes a common sense view of society and its problems. I try to look at things not from the standpoint of whether the issue has an R or a D next to it, but instead from the perspective of a rational human being trying to solve problems. Oddly enough, the common sense, practical perspective usually ends up being the conservative one. If you'd like a sane, average-Joe's point of view, check out the blog.

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Friday, July 29, 2016

The Green Party is angling to grab up Bernie Sanders as its presidential nominee now that it's become obvious the Democrats used him as a tool. (See link here.) Hillary just lost a lot of support; why not redirect that support away from Trump and into another channel? From a liberal perspective, that would be the best bet.

Sanders has already left the Democrat Party. (I can't bring myself to call it democratic considering the super-delegates.) Read the comments in the following article. (Link here.) The liberals are angry. Sanders supporters are not going to flock to Hillary--Bernie's speech was like that of a hostage with a gun to his head in an ISIS video. It fooled no one.

I hope Bernie runs. I disagree with him on everything, but he's sincere. You can't say that about Hillary Clinton.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

I cannot grasp why so many Democrats are suddenly shocked and surprised at the fact that the primary election was rigged, the DNC conspiring with the media to portray Bernie Sanders as a fringe candidate unworthy of serious consideration. I mean, that's what he is, but his policy proposals were perfectly in line with the values of the Democrat Party.

Still, it has been long known that the real power in the Democrat Party is held by the super-delegates. The party insiders control the outcome of the primary election, a system which could only be overcome by a landslide against the party's pre-selected nominee. Unless Sanders won by over 712 delegates, Hillary was going to be the nominee. Period. The Clintons have a great deal of control over the party mechanisms, and that control extends to votes. Many people owe them favors. Hillary is now cashing in her chips.

Whenever there is real and documented voter fraud, it is to the benefit of Democrats. When a whole district voted for Lyndon B. Johnson in alphabetical order, it was demonstrably fraudulent. Yet, the Democrat Party in Texas upheld the obviously manufactured votes. When Democrats fight every attempt to assure that only citizens are voting, and that people actually identify themselves to ensure that nobody is simply voting in their name, it is an obvious tactic to preserve the ability to manufacture votes. This is something we should have learned from the ACORN debacle, in which Disney characters and the whole Yankees team were registered to vote fraudulently. (Not to say that the Yankees can't vote, but that they shouldn't all be voting in Peoria.)

We're Democrats and we vote!

The real problem lies in the supposition of Progressives in general that the people are too stupid to know what's good for them and must be forced to comply with Progressive ideology. Hence the courts are used to overturn Conservative ballot measures and legislation, even when these fall outside the Constitution's explicitly-stated jurisdiction. Conservatives like Justice Scalia, who believe in using the wording and context of the original document as intended by those who wrote it, rightly wish to keep the Court's ruling within Constitutional boundaries. The Constitution reads:

Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution states exactly in which cases the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, may rule. The Constitution further grants Congress the right to define and provide boundaries for the federal courts' jurisdiction.

It also defines the areas in which the states have autonomy in the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

This is a difficult sentence to misinterpret. Its wording is clear and concise. It is also the most widely ignored sentence in the U.S. Constitution. Democrats do not care for the rule of law, unless they are laws written by Democrats. They do not like rules or limitations on their power of any kind. It should not surprise Bernie Sanders and his supporters that the system is rigged. Granted, Bernie had never registered as a Democrat until he decided to run in the 2016 election. He was therefore unprepared for the way the party operates. Still, he is a Progressive and thus familiar with the tactics of Saul Alinsky--do or say whatever you must to attain power.

The email scandal (the second now involving Hillary Clinton and/or her surrogates) exposes just who she and her ilk are. Do we really want that to run our country?

I, for one, say no. I hope Bernie's disillusioned supporters will join me in that decision.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Nobody wants to feel that their life is hanging by a fragile thread, subject to the slightest disruption, ready to snap and fall into the abyss. We want to feel safe and secure. We want to be able to trust that we can go from place to place and not be in mortal danger. We especially want to feel that those sworn to protect us will keep us from harm, not be sources of harm.

These are false expectations, of course. Our lives are constantly at risk. Being hit by a car, struck by lightning, having a seizure or a stroke while on the toilet--these and many more random events take the lives of people constantly. However, we cherish the illusion of security in a random world. This is why the idea of a police officer killing an unarmed citizen is such an abominable thing to society. We don't want to believe that a simple mistake could cost us our lives.

However, for race-baiting opportunists to label law-enforcement as racist murderers is both tragic and farcical. As Dinesh D'Souza pointed out in The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, there is a difference between racism and profiling. Racism is the belief that one race is inherently superior or inferior to another on biological grounds. The inferiority is an innate, inborn quality that cannot be overcome. Profiling is simply the acknowledgement that different groups of people, for cultural reasons, believe and behave according to patterns. He gives the example of a taxi driver avoiding black passengers. The taxi driver might indeed detest black people in general and thus be a genuine racist. Another possibility is that the driver knows the crime rate in Harlem and doesn't want to go there.

I know, it still feels racist, even as I write it out. But logic doesn't concern itself with such feelings. I had a similar experience in Ecuador. I tried to hire a taxi to take me to the area in which I was serving as a missionary. The driver refused to go, saying it was dangerous, so we agreed to be dropped off at the freeway exit. Odds are that this driver, or someone he knew, had been the victim of the residents of that neighborhood.

Law-enforcement officers interact with a great many people on a daily basis. Much of this interaction is negative. They observe patterns and types of people, not merely racial groups but cultural ones. A group of young people sagging their pants and wearing baseball caps with the tags still on, whatever their race, is going to get more police scrutiny than a group of young men in properly-fitting Boy Scout uniforms. Unfortunately, the culture of sagging pants and disdain for authority figures is more prevalent in some races than others. (If only we could make that culture disappear!) Thus we see that a disproportionate number of certain races will be scrutinized due to cultural cues.

It is culture, not color, that is the determining factor.

It is itself a breed of racism that we tend to identify the two as one. Our DNA does not come with a culture. If it did, there would be only four cultures in all of the world, one for each race. (Some argue that there are five races, but let's not over-complicate things.) Police learn quickly that interaction with the ghetto-welfare culture tends to be negative, and that this culture is much more prone to criminal activity. My term, the ghetto-welfare culture, is much kinder than Ken Hamblin's term, by the way.

With regard to the Alton Sterling case, as with others, the issue is the inherent resistance to authority of the ghetto-welfare culture. Sterling was a repeat offender, in and out of the criminal justice system many times. He knew what to do to be arrested peacefully, and he failed to do that. As a convicted felon, he was not allowed to have a firearm.

Some groups, such as Black Lives Matter, assume from the start that if an African-American is shot by police, the police are guilty. This is ridiculous. They also assume that police are supposed to allow their attacker to get a shot or two in before retaliating. This is also ridiculous. The television trope of a police officer shouting to a suspect "drop your weapon" three or four times before taking the shot is inaccurate and leads people to have false expectations. If a person is resisting arrest and police have reasonable suspicion to believe that he or she has or is reaching for a weapon, police can and will shoot. What else are they supposed to do? If the suspect were allowed to fire first, we'd be running very short on police in this country.

It is time that Black Lives Matter as well as other militant groups (FYF comes to mind) be treated as the criminal organizations they are. According to the RICO statute, originally designed to shut down the Mafia, members of a criminal organization can be charged with crimes of which any member is guilty. Once we establish that those who target police have an association with BLM, we can arrest the whole group and hold it accountable. It is high time that we do so.

Al Sharpton and other career racialists also need to be shut up by a bold presentation of the facts. They'll rant and rave, call us names, and pout like angry three-year-olds, but the truth will out. Voices of reason say, "Look at all of the evidence before you make a conclusion." Voices of unreason, like BLM, Sharpton, FYF and others, say, "Damn the evidence! We're mad!"

It's sad that we have allowed the voices of unreason to dominate the discussion on these issues. An illogical society won't last long--look what happened to the Soviet Union.

Friday, July 22, 2016

After watching Donald Trump's speech last night, I am struck by a few contrasting feelings. I suppose I should jot them all down and see if anyone else feels the same. This will be by no means a comprehensive list, but simply some areas of hope and some areas of concern for me personally. If you have any to add, please do so in the comments section.

1. Donald Trump shouted every line. Okay, so the presentation should count for less than the message, but watching him gesticulate, yell, and pause for dramatic effect seems a bit too similar to a totalitarian dictator for my tastes. Did someone reincarnate Juan Perón and teach him the virtues of capitalism?

2. The man asks for our trust a lot. "Trust me." "You gotta' believe me." It may be just a personal quirk, but Trump needs to learn to limit his asking for trust to once per speech. It sounds too needy.

3. Again, considering the venue I have to be forgiving here as well, but Trump seems to think of the office of president as having a great deal more autonomy than the Constitution grants it. "I will..." statements were constant and huge promises were made of actions that the president can't authorize on his own. That seems a little too Obamish for me. The Constitution properly limits the executive power to, well, executing the law. If he meant that he will finally enforce and execute all of the laws passed by Congress that Obama has flaunted or nullified, he has my vote. If he meant that he will do them with or without Congressional approval, we have a problem.

4. Donald Trump is a protectionist. I love this! Going on about the special interests, including crony capitalists, who have bought the Clinton campaign was a great idea. We export jobs because some in the business sector want to buy labor at an abusively-low cost and sell finished goods at high cost to American consumers. This makes perfect business sense, but it's bad for the country.

5. Lowering taxes will increase cash flow, which will increase revenue. You can find a crap-ton of articles online right now by liberals who are apoplectic over Trump's proposals to lower taxes and have money to rebuild the military and our infrastructure. These liberals haven't the foggiest comprehension of simple market economics. People react in predictable ways to incentives. When you increase the costs of offshore labor for our market (tariffs) and decrease the cost of relocating that labor to the United States (tax cuts), you create a huge incentive to bring jobs here. Combine that with controlling and enforcing immigration laws and you have a huge benefit to low-to-medium wage laborers. You won't need to pass new minimum wage legislation; wages will rise as the natural result of more jobs and fairer competition for them.

6. Donald Trump doesn't get education policy any more than current Democrats or Republicans do. He wants to enable all kids' parents to send their children to safe schools. Step back and think for a moment-who precisely is making schools unsafe? Are the teachers and administrators running around shooting and stabbing the student body? Of course not. His goal is laudable but impossible and based on a false premise. Schools aren't failing students; too many students are failing schools. The system is allowing this to happen without consequences for the student. Until this is addressed, the ownership of schools, whether public or private, will not change a thing. Mike Pence should be able to address this considering the number of charter schools closed due to failure to increase their students' test scores in Indiana. A lengthy but comprehensive plan to fix this problem is already on this blog. (Click here.)

Don't take it personally-I'm only angry because this is a public school!

7. After all is said and done, and considering I'm not the biggest Trump fan on Earth, the speech left me feeling hopeful. It was quite optimistic, but realistically so. "Yeah, things suck right now, but we're Americans. We can fix this because we can do anything we set our minds to." I don't understand how the media is portraying this as a pessimistic speech or convention, except that it's been honest about the problems we face as a nation.

Well, like I said, this is but a short list of my impressions from last night. Feel free to add your own; I'd love to see what others think about the speech, provided you actually watched the whole thing and aren't just reacting to what you've read about it as relayed by others.